
Philosophy in Dialogue
Plato's Many Devices
Gary Alan Scott(Editor)
Northwestern University Press
Published on 30. August 2007
Book
Paperback/Softback
328 pages
978-0-8101-2356-4 (ISBN)
Description
Traditional Plato scholarship, in the English-speaking world, has assumed that Platonic dialogues are merely collections of arguments. Inevitably, the question arises: if Plato wanted to present collections of arguments, why did he write dialogues instead of treatises? Concerned about this question, some scholars have been experimenting with other, more contextualized ways of reading the dialogues. This anthology is among the first to present these new approaches as pursued by a variety of scholars. As such, it offers new perspectives on Plato as well as a suggestive view of Plato scholarship as something of a laboratory for historians of philosophy generally. The essays gathered here each examine vital aspects of Plato's many methods, considering his dialogues in relation to Thucydides and Homer, narrative strategies and medical practice, images and metaphors. They offer surprising new research into such much-studied works as ""The Republic"" as well as revealing views of lesser-known dialogues like the Cratylus and Philebus. With reference to thinkers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, and Sartre, the authors place the Platonic dialogues in an illuminating historical context. Together, their essays should reinvigorate the scholarly examination of the way Plato's dialogues ""work"" - and should prompt a reconsideration of how the form of Plato's philosophical writing bears on the Platonic conception of philosophy.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Evanston
United States
Target group
Adult education
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 160 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8101-2356-4 (9780810123564)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
12/2007
1st Edition
Northwestern University Press
€152.99
Available for download
Persons
Gary Alan Scott is an associate professor of philosophy at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the author of Plato's Socrates as Educator (SUNY, 2000) and the editor of Does Socrates Have a Method? Rethinking the Elenchus in Plato's Dialogues and Beyond (Pennsylvania State, 2004).
Content
Introduction by Gary Alan Scott; 1. Plato's Book of Images by Nicholas D. Smith; 2. ""To Say What is Most Necessary"": Expositional and Philosophical Practice in Thucydides and Plato by Phil Hopkins; 3. Medicine, Philosophy, and Socrates's Proposals to Glaucon about Gumnastike in Republic 403b-412b by Mark Moes; 4. Know Thyself: Socrates as Storyteller, by Anne-Marie Bowery; 5. Homeric Methodos in Plato's Socratic Dialogues by Bernard Freydberg; 6. Of Psychic Maieutics and Dialogical Bondage in Plato's Theaetetus by Benjamin J. Grazzini; 7. Plato's Different Device: Reconciling the One and the Many in the Philebus by Martha Kendal Woodruff; 8. Is There Method in This Madness? Context, Play, and Laughter in Plato's Symposium and Republic by Christopher P. Long; 9. Traveling with Socrates: Dialectic in the Phaedo and Protagoras by Gerard Kuperus; 10. In Plato's Image by Jill Gordon; Appendix: Dramatic Dates of Plato's Dialogues.